Mrs. Roundell's Practical cookery book

Sledmere Sponge Gingerbread. — (Family Recipe.)— Half a pound of butter, of sugar, and of treacle, a pound of flour, an ounce of ginger, and a teaspoonful of carbonate of soda. Put the butter, sugar, and treacle all together and set it by the fire to melt. Then beat four eggs, stir into them the butter, sugar, and treacle, then the ginger and soda, and lastly the flour. Do not bake it hard. Gingerbread Nuts to take out Hunting.— (Family Recipe.) — To one pound of fine flour put four ounces of fresh butter, and carefully rub it well into the flour. Then add two ounces of best freshly-powdered ginger, a quarter of an ounce of allspice in fine powder, a grated nutmeg, a quarter of an ounce of powdered cloves, half a pound of good moist sugar, GINGERBREAD NUTS TO TAKE OUT HUNTING 543 one teaspoonful of cayenne pepper and the same of powdered cardamoms. All these to be well mixed in one pound of fresh treacle, and after standing a short time to be cut into pieces, rolled into balls, pressed flat with the hands, then put on a buttered tin and baked in a hot oven. These Gingerbread Nuts were always taken out hunting by the three famous riders, of whom the Cheshire Hunting Song says : “ Were my life to depend on the wager I know not which brother I’d back, The Parson, the Squire, or the Major, The Purple, the Pink, or the Black ! ” (Of course, for ordinary Gingerbread Nuts the spices are omitted.) TEA, COFFEE, COCOA, ETC. It seems superfluous to give suggestions for the making of Tea in these days, when Tea has been a daily drink in England for more than a century. But too often it is, as I once heard an old lady exclaim at breakfast in a large country-house, “ Footman’s Tea ! Black as ink, and filled up from the boiler ! ” Not one servant in twenty knows when water is really boiling ; they either pour it off at the first bubble (generally into a cold tea-pot), or they take it from the “washing-up kettle,” which has been simmering on the hob for the last hour and a half. If the water has boiled a long time, or if it has boiled and cooled and been boiled up again, it is useless for anything but “washing-up.” Tea requires water which has been freshly drawn, brought up to boiling-point, and used when absolutely boiling. This is easily managed by using the locomotive kettle on the table, not on the fire. This kettle, which can be procured at 119 New Bond Street, is constructed on the principle of the boiler of a railway engine, and really does boil water in four minutes. It is provided with a wind-guard, so that it can be used for tea out of doors. Scald out the teapot with boiling water, pour it off at once, and make the tea. The old rule is a good one — one spoonful for each person and one for the pot. Do not lot the tea “ infuse ” more than five minutes after you have added the boiling water, or it will become Footman’s Tea, or will resemble the still more tea, coffee, cocoa, etc. dreadful decoction sanctioned by the Local Government Board for use in English Workhouses. In this case the allowance of tea is never more than two ounces to a gallon of water, and in many workhouses it is allowed to “draw” for an hour and a half in the coppers in order to get a colour.